squeekboard - a Wayland on-screen keyboard

Squeekboard is the on-screen-keyboard input-method for Phosh. It is primarily designed for smartphones, tablet-PCs, and other devices with touchscreens.

It squeaks because some Rust got inside.

Features

Present

• GTK3
• Custom keyboard layouts defined in yaml
• Input purpose dependent keyboard layouts
• DBus interface to show and hide
• Use Wayland input method protocol to submit text
• Use Wayland virtual keyboard protocol

TODO

• Port to GTK4 / GTK4-Layer-Shell
• Text prediction/correction
• Use preedit
• Submit actions like "next field" using a future Wayland protocol
• Pick up DBus interface files from /usr/share

Creating layouts

If you want to work on layouts, check out the guide.

Nightly builds

For testing the latest commits of the main-branch, one can install the nightly builds of Squeekboard. For more information about the nightly builds, read the "Phosh Nightly Package Builds"-blog-post.

Building

Dependencies

See .gitlab-ci.yml or run apt-get build-dep .

Build from git repo

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/squeekboard.git
$ cd squeekboard
$ mkdir _build
$ meson setup _build/
$ cd _build
$ ninja

To run tests use ninja test. To install squeekboard run ninja install.

Running

$ cd ../build/
$ src/squeekboard

If no compatible Wayland compositor is running yet, you can use Phoc (after installing it):

$ phoc --exec 'src/squeekboard'

Squeekboard's panel will appear whenever a compatible application requests an input method. Click a text field in any GTK application, like python3 ./tools/entry.py.

Squeekboard honors the gnome "screen-keyboard-enabled" setting. Either enable this through gnome-settings under accessibility or run:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-keyboard-enabled true

Alternatively, force panel visibility manually with:

$ busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b true

or by using the environment-variable SQUEEKBOARD_DEBUG=force_show.

What the compositor has to support

A compatible compositor has to support the protocols:

• layer-shell
• virtual-keyboard-v1

It's strongly recommended to support:

• input-method-v2

Settings

You can change the height of the panel for the keyboard with:

$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard scale-in-horizontal-screen-orientation 1.0
$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard scale-in-vertical-screen-orientation 1.0

and wether or not layouts will stretch to fit the panel with:

$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard layout-shape-changes-to-fit-panel true
$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard layout-shape-changes-to-fit-panel false

Note: If the keyboard is open when the settings are changed, the changes will not be visible until the keyboard is opened again, or the layout is changed. While using Phosh, you can long-click/long-tap the home-bar at the bottom, to open and close the keyboard.

To reset the settings to the default, you can use:

$ gsettings reset-recursively sm.puri.Squeekboard

Developing

See doc/hacking.md for this copy, or the official documentation for the current release.